Monday, August 17, 2015

Many mothers do not have the choice. Some single
mothers must work to support their families. Others need to supplement the
family income. Still others enjoy working outside of the home.

Whatever the reason, studies are discovering that when
mothers have erratic work schedules, their children suffer. Children need
consistency and routines. When mothers can be called in to a job on short
notice, the disruption hurts their children.

This phenomenon has led some government officials to request
or require employers to stop using the “on call” scheduling model. The studies
suggest that retail stores are particularly at fault on this score.

And yet, the New York Times article does not mention that physicians, especially residents, routinely
have “on call” schedules. Does this mean that female physicians must wait until
after residency to have children? Does it suggest that women who want a medical
career ought to gravitate toward specialties, like dermatology, that do not
have “on call” schedules?

Perhaps emergency medicine is not the best career
choice for a mother. Perhaps, women who choose to work while bringing up small
children should choose their career paths with this information in mind.

The Times reports the story:

A
growing body of research suggests that children’s language and problem-solving
skills may suffer as a result of their parents’ problematic schedules, and that
they may be more likely than other children to smoke and drink when they are
older.

“Young
children and adolescents of parents working unpredictable schedules or outside
standard daytime working hours are more likely to have inferior cognitive and
behavioral outcomes,” the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal advocacy group,
said last week in a report.

One is not surprised to see that the Times and the Economic
Policy Institute place the onus on employers. And yet, the message is
cautionary for women who work outside of the home and who do not have the
resources to hire nannies to nurture their children.

Obviously, one would prefer that all parents can find good
child care. But, why do these studies seem to ignore the possibility that
mothers care for their children, or, at the least, that they find work that
allows them a more regular schedule? If they demonstrate anything, the studies
show that a mother’s routine presence at home is vitally important for
childhood development. One understands that a nanny or a governess can serve as
a substitute mother, but is the same true of outside child care services?

Looking at the research into child development we can only
conclude that if women work outside the home, they must, at the least have very
regular schedules:

In one
of the most respected studies, published in 2005 in the journal Child Development,
Prof. Wen-Jui Han of New York University looked at children during their first
three years of life, controlling for such demographic variables as their
mothers’ income, education, and race and ethnicity.

Professor
Han, who was then at Columbia University, found that children of mothers who
worked nonstandard schedules performed lower on problem-solving, verbal
comprehension and spoken language tests than children of mothers who worked
traditional schedules. Part of the explanation, she concluded, was increased
stress on the part of the parents.

“Parents
try their best to attend to their children in a sensitive and warm manner, but
the physical and emotional exhaustion from nonstandard schedules makes it
difficult,” Professor Han said in an interview. “With young children, if
they’re crying, asking for food, asking for something, it’s all about how you
interact with them.”

But this also precludes mothers having very demanding work
schedules. A corporate lawyer or an executive vice president does not own her
own time. Such high powered, high profile jobs preclude a woman’s being a real
presence at home. Didn’t Anne-Marie Slaughter famously quit her job as director
of policy planning at the State Department because her children could not
handle her irregular and sustained absences?

Her experience serves to demonstrate the truth of the research results.Even for
older children, the predictable presence of mothers, their participation in
routines, their availability has an important impact on their children:

As for
adolescents, Professor Han and two colleagues published a second
paper, in the journal Developmental Psychology in 2010, which said that the
longer mothers worked odd hours, the more likely their children were to smoke,
drink, act out and engage in sexual activity.

How do most women deal with these problems? Quite simple,
the Times reports, they avoid occupations that have “on call” schedules.
Considering the importance of their presence it makes sense that they ought at
the least to consider that their parenting responsibilities preclude certain
types of work and make other types preferable.

Women who choose to work outside of the home, even women who
do not have the choice understand full well, and probably understood it before
the studies came out, that they cannot, if they want to be good mothers, have
careers that are precisely the same as those of men.

5 comments:

See also systems programmer, cable splicer, data center manager, and the list goes on. Every job I have had since high school (I was never a splicer, but I have been a bunch of things not listed here) has had an "on-call characteristic.

To avoid any "on-calls" every job would have to be staffed three or four people deep.

I have to admit there are times when I wonder what women would do if they didn't have men to blame for everything. I have begun to see a lot of this as a complement and an acknowledgement of power and importance I never knew I had.

So women, once they have children, have to leave police work, paramedic work, fire department work, the military, any command position, any senior executive position, can't be a plumber, a power line worker, any emergency employee, etc?

So basically, we go back to where women leave the workforce once they get married and have children? Nice, way to roll back feminism.